Countdown to Breakout is a 23-day blog series about the three-year writing process for BREAKOUT, which earned starred reviews from both School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. It’s about a small-town prison break and manhunt that change the way three kids see their neighbors and the place they call home. Why a 23-day series? Because this book was inspired by the 2015 Clinton Correctional Facility prison break that led to a 23-day manhunt in June of 2015.
The Sounds of Home
One of the books that my BREAKOUT character Elidee signs out of the town’s public library is BROWN GIRL DREAMING, Jacqueline Woodson’s amazing memoir in verse. I knew that Elidee would feel connected to Woodson’s poems because there are so many parallels between their stories. There’s even a poem in BROWN GIRL DREAMING about Woodson’s experience driving up New York’s Interstate 87 to visit a relative in the prison at Dannemora.
Elidee uses several of Woodson’s poems as mentor texts – starting places for her own writing. One of them is the poem “Lullaby,” in which Woodson writes about the sounds of home. Elidee writes two poems with that title, one set in Wolf Creek and one set in Highbridge, the Bronx neighborhood where she lived before she moved.
Wolf Creek is a fictional town, but it’s very similar to the area where I live, so that lullaby was a familiar one for me. But while I’ve visited plenty of big cities, I’ve never lived in a one, and visiting isn’t the same. I reached out to friends who live in New York and asked what they hear on summer nights. I chose the sounds that seemed to fit Elidee’s old neighborhood the best, spent a lot of time playing with the language, and worked some of those ideas into her second poem.
I’ve been talking a lot about Elidee in these writing-process posts because she’s the character in this book that was the most challenging for me to represent. Many of the other characters share a cultural background and life experiences that are more similar to my own, so their stories came more naturally. Making Elidee feel real and true to character required more work. That included lots of reading, a field trip, and reaching out for help. More on that tomorrow, but for now, let’s try a lullaby.
Your Assignment: Using Elidee’s poems as mentor texts, write a lullaby for the place you call home.
Thanks for joining me on this part of the Breakout writing-process journey! If you’d like to read the other posts in this series once they’re all posted, you can find them here.
Countdown to Breakout is a 23-day blog series about the three-year writing process for BREAKOUT, which earned starred reviews from both School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. It’s about a small-town prison break and manhunt that change the way three kids see their neighbors and the place they call home. Why a 23-day series? Because this book was inspired by the 2015 Clinton Correctional Facility prison break that led to a 23-day manhunt in June of 2015.
Working with Expert Readers
As writers, we tell stories about all different kinds of characters and situations, and only some of those are drawn from our own experiences. I’ve written about coral restoration, drug addiction and recovery, tornadoes, and genetic engineering. I’m not an expert in any of those things, so getting the details right required hours and hours of reading as well as consulting with people who are experts in those topics, who have the expertise that I lack. Writing about characters from different cultural backgrounds requires that same kind of care, too, and at an even higher level because poor representation can have a profoundly negative effect on young readers from marginalized groups.
BREAKOUT has three main characters who do most of the storytelling. Nora Tucker is the prison superintendent’s daughter, and Lizzy Bruno is Nora’s best friend. Both are white girls who were born and raised in a small rural town, and both share backgrounds that are fairly similar to mine. But the third main character, Elidee, is an African American girl from the Bronx, who’s moved to Wolf Creek and discovered that she’s one of just two black kids at her new school. Those aren’t experiences I’ve had, so I had to rely on my past work in teaching middle school as well as a lot of reading and talking with people to get a sense for how Elidee might perceive the events in the story and what that move might mean to her.
That involved working with expert readers, or sensitivity readers, as they’re sometimes called. Quite simply, these are people who usually share elements of character’s background, and who read manuscripts for the purpose of shining a light on places where an author’s ignorance, lack of experience, or implicit biases are having a negative effect on their craft.
I had a lot of readers for BREAKOUT. Some were friends who shared part of Elidee’s background in that they’re black and went to school in urban areas or had the experience of being one of very few brown faces in a classroom or other community. They offered great insight, especially early in my revision process.
I also hired several professional readers to look at later drafts of the manuscript. They read BREAKOUT as I worked through final revisions and offered feedback, mostly related to Elidee’s character. An expert reader like this is paid for their work and typically takes anywhere from two weeks to a couple of months to read the book and write a letter providing feedback, pointing out places where the representation might not be solid or where more work needs to be done. This was incredibly helpful, and they pointed out some issues that my friends who read the book hadn’t mentioned.
I love my writer friends to pieces, but I’m also a big believer of having experts who don’t know you as readers because they don’t assume good intentions as friends might. My friends know who I am. They know about my support of diversity efforts in publishing. We’ve had long dinners together, and heartfelt conversations about racism, white supremacy, and social justice. At the end of the day, they know that my intentions are good. But good intentions aren’t enough when it comes to writing books with characters from marginalized groups. The reality is that my personal history with diversity and social justice issues doesn’t get to go out into the world with my book when it’s published. The story has to stand on its own. All stories do. So the reader you really want for a project like this is the toughest, most critical one you can find.
The letters that expert readers provide authors aren’t meant to be passed along, but I can share, in general terms, some of the invaluable suggestions I received from these readers.
1 – One pushed me to work more on Elidee’s relationship with her mom. Nora’s family felt more fully developed (probably because it was more like my own), and I needed to build that kind of closeness with Elidee and her mother.
2 – Elidee felt less developed as a character than the other girls, and one reader suggested that part of the problem was that I didn’t have a strong enough sense for where she’d come from before she moved. If Wolf Creek didn’t feel like home, what did?
3 – That same reader felt like Elidee’s reactions to some of the micro-aggressions she experienced in Wolf Creek weren’t realistic at first. As a new student who’d been taught how to fit in (and her mother would have made sure of this) her reactions should have been more nuanced, at least while she was getting to know people.
4 – Another reader pointed out that a character had used the phrase “circle the wagons,” which is based on negative stereotypes about Native people. It dates back to pioneer days when the thought was to circle up the covered wagons at night to protect white settlers from violent Natives (never mind that those settlers were arriving to steal their land). The line had nothing to do with the primary race issues in BREAKOUT, my reader noted, but can you imagine how it would feel if a teacher were reading this book aloud in a classroom with just one Native student? It didn’t matter that the line was a quick one, or that it came from a character who would have been clueless about its origins. It mattered that he said it, and it went unchallenged in that scene, as if it was a fine thing to say. So I had a decision to make as a writer – either take the time to unpack that language and explain its racist origin on that page, or find a different way to get the idea across. Explaining would have added multiple paragraphs that took away from what was happening in the story at a pretty tense moment. But the character’s use of that phrase wasn’t a one-time thing – the phrase echoed in several places later in the story. Ultimately, I ended up changing it – and going back to revise all the places where other characters had referenced the line later on.
There have been some terribly misleading articles online about expert readers, or sensitivity readers, in recent months. I’ve even seen people who don’t understand this part of the writing process say that it’s censorship, that no one should tell an author what to write. I find that notion to be ridiculous. I can’t imagine writing a book about a particular branch of science or police work or law without consulting experts. This is no different, except the stakes are higher. When we’re writing about characters from traditionally marginalized groups, whose cultural backgrounds are different from ours, there’s a greater responsibility to do everything we can to get it right because poor representation in fiction harms kids in the real world.
Ultimately, that responsibility rests with the author – not the expert reader, who only gives advice. Tomorrow and the next day, I’ll share more about my research and revision after I heard from those expert readers. Here’s today’s prompt:
Your Assignment: What are some elements of your own cultural or personal background that would be tough for an outsider to understand or write about without research and conversations?
Thanks for joining me on this part of the Breakout writing-process journey! If you’d like to read the other posts in this series once they’re all posted, you can find them here.
Countdown to Breakout is a 23-day blog series about the three-year writing process for BREAKOUT, which earned starred reviews from both School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. It’s about a small-town prison break and manhunt that change the way three kids see their neighbors and the place they call home. Why a 23-day series? Because this book was inspired by the 2015 Clinton Correctional Facility prison break that led to a 23-day manhunt in June of 2015.
Elidee’s Library Receipt and Mentor Texts
Once I decided to include Elidee’s poems in the documents that tell the story of BREAKOUT, I spent some time exploring the books she might love best – titles that might inspire her and serve as mentor texts for her own writing. As a former teacher, I know how important the scaffolding of a mentor text – a structure to borrow – can be for students just finding their poetic voices.
Here’s the page of BREAKOUT that shows Elidee’s receipt from the Wolf Creek Public Library…
Working on a novel-in-documents is like doing a giant jigsaw puzzle, where every time you revise one tiny thing, a big, drooly dog comes and knocks all the other pieces onto the floor, and some of them bounce under the sofa. Really, it feels like that. So as I revised, I was constantly working to make sure all the threads of the story were woven through consistently. See that book on Elidee’s list about the Hubble Space Telescope? She signs it out for a reason you’ll understand after another process post I’ll share in a few days. 🙂
Most of the books on Elidee’s reading list are poetry, though. I signed all of them out of my public library and read through, looking for the poems I thought Elidee would love most, and those that might connect with her situation in Wolf Creek as the manhunt continued. Here’s how Elidee used “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks as mentor text for her own poem.
Tomorrow, we’ll look at Elidee’s connections to BROWN GIRL DREAMING by Jacqueline Woodson, but for now, it’s time to try your own mentor-text poem.
Today’s Assignment: Choose an event from today’s current events and write a poem in the style of “We Real Cool” about it.
Thanks for joining me on this part of the Breakout writing-process journey! If you’d like to read the other posts in this series once they’re all posted, you can find them here.
Countdown to Breakout is a 23-day blog series about the three-year writing process for BREAKOUT, which earned starred reviews from both School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. It’s about a small-town prison break and manhunt that change the way three kids see their neighbors and the place they call home. Why a 23-day series? Because this book was inspired by the 2015 Clinton Correctional Facility prison break that led to a 23-day manhunt in June of 2015.
The Hamilton Effect
Being a writer is different from many other jobs in that you’re never really off the clock. When I’m working on a book, I can’t really turn off my writer brain (much to my family’s dismay sometimes, when they’re trying to get me to focus on something else). And when I’m living in a character’s world, I tend to see things in my world through the lens of that character’s experiences, too. That’s how Hamilton ended up in BREAKOUT.
When I went to see the Broadway musical Hamilton in April of 2016, I was deep in the revision process, rewriting BREAKOUT from a single narrative told in first person to a novel-in-documents with many different perspectives. I’d been working a lot with Elidee, a character who’d just moved from the Bronx to this quiet and nearly all-white prison town where the manhunt was happening. Elidee was incredibly homesick and felt anything but welcome in Wolf Creek, and I thought of her when I heard Lin Manuel Miranda sing “Hurricane.”
I wrote my way out Wrote everything down far as I could see I wrote my way out I looked up and the town had its eyes on me…
Elidee’s brother was in prison and had been working on an appeal. She’d think of him when she heard those lyrics, but maybe of her own situation, too. Could she write her way out of Wolf Creek and write herself back home?
This was the inspiration for Elidee’s experimentation with poetry throughout the book. She uses Hamilton lyrics as inspiration and writes rap lyrics offering commentary on the happenings in Wolf Creek. This one was inspired by “Ten Duel Commandments” and is in a letter Elidee wrote to her brother Troy in prison.
As Wolf Creek’s manhunt drags on, Elidee uses more Hamilton lyrics as well as other great poems as mentor texts as she works to find her voice. We’ll explore some of her other mentor texts in tomorrow’s post, but for now, it’s time to try your hand at some Hamilton-inspired lyrics, too.
Your Assignment:Choose a song from Hamilton (or another song if you prefer) and rewrite the lyrics so they reflect an event or issue in your own community or school. (Elidee also rewrote one of the Hamilton Cabinet Battles as a rap battle between her school’s vice principal and student council president.)
Thanks for joining me on this part of the Breakout writing-process journey! If you’d like to read the other posts in this series once they’re all posted, you can find them here.
Countdown to Breakout is a 23-day blog series about the three-year writing process for BREAKOUT, which earned starred reviews from both School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. It’s about a small-town prison break and manhunt that change the way three kids see their neighbors and the place they call home. Why a 23-day series? Because this book was inspired by the 2015 Clinton Correctional Facility prison break that led to a 23-day manhunt in June of 2015.
Evil plots, master plans, and comics (or, the importance of humor)
The real-life prison break in Northern NY was still going on when I started writing BREAKOUT, which provided me with a unique opportunity for research. In addition to spending time in the area around the prison in Dannemora, I paid attention to social media posts, many under the hashtag #PrisonBreakNY, which offered so many different perspectives on the manhunt.
That last tweet – the notion of group of kids forming their own search party – resonated with me, and I immediately thought of Nora’s little brother, Owen. What if Owen kept a notebook with plans for defeating the inmates? He likes to draw, so it could be a series of graphic novel panels, another way to diversify the kinds of documents included in the story.
Creating these pages required a different kind of writing – with captions, narration, and illustration notes for each panel. It looked like this in the manuscript:
POST IT: Sunday, June 16 – From Owen’s plots/plans notebook
OWEN AND NOAH’S MASTER PLAN TO DEFEND THE BACK YARD FROM BAD GUYS
Illus: Tree fort
List of supplies:
Binoculars
Catapult supplies
Sticks
Stretchy things (giant rubber bands?)
Rocks
Cell phone
Wand
Brownies
SCENE 1: Wide shot of yard, Lizzie, Elidee, Nora running w/ batons, Owen & Noah in tree fort
SCENE 2: Medium shot of tree fort – Owen & Noah looking out at woods with binoculars
SCENE 3: Seen through binoculars – Close-up Inmate faces, hiding in trees
SCENE 4: (series of smaller panels…)
Owen & Noah load big rock into catapult
Ready! Aim! FIRE!!!
Schwwwwwwingggg! (Rock goes flying)
Again! FIRE!!!!!
Schwwwwwwingggg! Zzzzzinggg! (Rock goes flying)
SCENE 5: Wide shot of trees w/ rocks hitting inmates
THUNK! BONK!
SCENE 6: Medium shot: Inmates on ground, knocked out, Owen standing over them holding wand.
“Stoppia Inmatia!!”
SCENE 7: Owen & Noah in tree fort, Owen on cell phone
“Don’t worry, officer. We immobilized them with a spell. They’re not going anywhere.”
SCENE 8: Police leading dazed inmates away in handcuffs
SCENE 9: Owen & Noah in tree fort eating brownies, girls running in background
And here’s how those pages turned out in the final version of BREAKOUT.
Owen’s graphic novel panels are an important part of the story, not only because they provide a younger person’s perspective, but also because they offer something every story needs: humor. We don’t often think of thrillers or books with serious themes as being funny, but I’d argue that humor is just as essential in these stories as it is in a comedy. No reader can stand being on edge for 400 pages, and even readers who love pondering big ideas need a break from those ideas sometimes.
Sometimes that break comes in the form of graphic novel panels, and sometimes it comes in the form of musical theater. We’ll talk about “The Hamilton Effect” in BREAKOUT tomorrow. Here’s today’s prompt:
Your Assignment:Write about a sad or serious moment in your life when humor played an important role. If you’d like, try writing it as a series of graphic novel panels.
Thanks for joining me on this part of the Breakout writing-process journey! If you’d like to read the other posts in this series once they’re all posted, you can find them here.
Countdown to Breakout is a 23-day blog series about the three-year writing process for BREAKOUT, which earned starred reviews from both School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. It’s about a small-town prison break and manhunt that change the way three kids see their neighbors and the place they call home. Why a 23-day series? Because this book was inspired by the 2015 Clinton Correctional Facility prison break that led to a 23-day manhunt in June of 2015.
Operation Michigan
As I rewrote BREAKOUT from a narrative with one character’s point of view into a novel-in-documents, one of the scenes I knew I wanted to include was “Operation Michigan.”
If you live in Northern NY, you already know what a Michigan is and you can skip to the paragraph with the **.
Everybody else… Where I live, Michigan is not just a state; it’s a regional food specialty that looks like a chili dog, but people here will quickly correct you if you call it that. It’s a hot dog with a specially simmered meat sauce, the original and best recipe for which is a claim staked by at least six different local families I know. You can have Michigans “with” or “without” and that refers to onions. If you ask for the onions buried, they’ll put them on before the sauce. There are rules for Michigans. Here’s what they look like.
I swiped this photo from the Clare & Carl’s Facebook page. Clare & Carl’s is a Michigan stand that looks like it’s about to crumble into the earth but keeps hanging in there, and it’s where you should get your Michigan if you ever visit here when it’s warm enough out for them to be open.
Now…about Operation Michigan.
** When the real-life manhunt was going on, one of my friends and her daughter were living relatively close to the prison, at the epicenter of the manhunt. As a result, they found themselves trapped inside occasionally when police searchers told them the search was too close to their home for the yard to be safe.
So they made Michigans. They set up an assembly line where one person put the hot dog in the bun, one ladled on the sauce, and one wrapped it up in waxed paper and put it in the box. (There was no onion option for these because that’s just too many onions to chop.) Then they got in the car and delivered Michigans all up and down the road to the officers who were stationed in their area. Some of them were from out of town and didn’t even know what a Michigan was, but everyone was grateful.
I used their story as the inspiration for a scene in BREAKOUT where Nora’s family launches a similar effort at a time when Elidee is over at their house. Nora’s and Elidee’s perspectives aren’t the same, but they both help out. Nora’s excited to deliver food to the searchers, many of whom she knows as relatives and neighbors. Elidee is just glad to be part of a community effort in this new place where she’s had a hard time settling in; the Michigans remind her of a lemonade stand she and her brother set up with their cousins a long time ago in their neighborhood in the Bronx. Nora’s and Elidee’s letters about “Operation Michigan” are among the documents that tell the story. And of course, there’s a Michigan sauce recipe included, too. (courtesy of my friend Sara Kelly Johns)
Tomorrow, I’ll share the story of how social media posts from the real life prison break served as an inspiration for Nora’s little brother, Owen, and we’ll talk about the role of humor in tense stories. Here’s your prompt for today:
Your Assignment: Think of a food that’s really unique to the place you live or your family. How would you describe that dish to someone who’s never heard of it before?
Thanks for joining me on this part of the Breakout writing-process journey! If you’d like to read the other posts in this series once they’re all posted, you can find them here.
Countdown to Breakout is a 23-day blog series about the three-year writing process for BREAKOUT, which earned starred reviews from both School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. It’s about a small-town prison break and manhunt that change the way three kids see their neighbors and the place they call home. Why a 23-day series? Because this book was inspired by the 2015 Clinton Correctional Facility prison break that led to a 23-day manhunt in June of 2015.
Blue ribbons and point of view
If I’ve noticed anything in talking current events with people from around the country this past year, it’s that sometimes, two people can hear the same speech or read about the same incident and come away with completely different perspectives on what was said or what happened. That was an idea I knew I wanted to explore in BREAKOUT.
When our real-life Northern New York prison break manhunt was underway, people reacted in lots of different ways – with fear and anxiety, with shows of support for the searchers, and in some cases, with a new apprehension about anyone who seemed different. I paid attention to all of that and thought about how people from different backgrounds might view things like a blue ribbon tied on a tree as a show of support for law enforcement…
…or a request to deliver snacks and bottled water for police manning roadblocks.
How might those public shows of support be seen by a kid like Elidee, the sister of a prison inmate, who came from a city neighborhood where community relations with law enforcement were tense?
How might she see this sign, which I saw posted on a lot of social media pages around the time of the prison break?
This one was especially interesting to me, because in a sense, it divides the entire population of a community into three categories: prison inmates (referred to as “monsters”), law enforcement (the “we” of the quote), and “the weak” (everybody else). I understood why relatives of corrections officers would love the saying, especially at a time when their loved ones were facing criticism, even as they put their lives on the line in the manhunt. But I also wondered how those signs might feel to the relatives of prison inmates. I ended up using this as one of the documents that different characters talk about in the book. I also included the top-secret “Operation Michigan,” which we’ll talk about tomorrow. Here’s your writing prompt for today:
Your assignment:Write for a few minutes, reflecting on the “monsters and the weak” quote. You can write from your own perspective, or take on the voice of a corrections officer, prison inmate, inmate’s relative, or civilian.
Thanks for joining me on this part of the Breakout writing-process journey! If you’d like to read the other posts in this series once they’re all posted, you can find them here.
Countdown to Breakout is a 23-day blog series about the three-year writing process for BREAKOUT, which earned starred reviews from both School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. It’s about a small-town prison break and manhunt that change the way three kids see their neighbors and the place they call home. Why a 23-day series? Because this book was inspired by the 2015 Clinton Correctional Facility prison break that led to a 23-day manhunt in June of 2015.
Making Room for Serendipity
I was on an airplane on my way home from the NCTE conference in 2015 when I met a stranger who ended up helping me reimagine my BREAKOUT rewrite.
I was sitting next to my writer pal Linda Urban, talking about how I wanted to start the book over, rewriting it as a collection of documents, and Linda was helping me brainstorm. When we first sat down, the woman on the other side of me was reading a book. But after a while, I noticed that she’d put it down and seemed to be listening, so I turned to let her know why her seat mates were blabbing on and on about school field days and news reports about police searchers.
She was a teacher, coming home from the conference, too. She was excited to hear that we were authors, talking about a novel-in-progress, and asked what it was about. I explained that it was about a prison break, inspired by the real life prison break at Clinton Correctional Facility in Northern New York, which was close to where I lived. When I named the prison, her eyes lit up with recognition, and I said, “Oh! You heard about this on the news?”
“Yes,” she said. “My brother is an inmate at that prison.”
My mouth dropped open. When I regained my composure enough to talk, I shared with her that my character Elidee’s brother was an inmate at the prison in Wolf Creek, too.
“Wow,” she said.
“I know,” I said. And then I took a deep breath and took a risk.
“Is there any way you might consider talking with me more about this? I’d love to have your perspective on this story.”
She nodded. “Yes, I think I’d like to do that.” She paused, and then said, “I feel like I was supposed to sit next to you today.”
My next question: “How long is your layover in Philadelphia?”
It was long enough that she had time for dinner, so we found a restaurant, ordered, and talked. She told me about her brother’s experiences and what it had been like to grow up with an older sibling who got in trouble with the law, how she’d felt pressure to be extra good to make things easier on her mother. I told her what I’d written so far, including the detail that Elidee and her mom had moved to Wolf Creek to be closer to her brother in the prison. She frowned a little. “Not sure I buy that unless she has another connection there and knows it’ll be okay. Does she know someone?”
She didn’t. But she could. What about a friend from home who’d moved there the year before? My new friend nodded. That would work, she said. And maybe give her a church community, too. That would help.
Eventually, we had to leave for our gates, but we kept in touch, and she offered to read the new version of BREAKOUT when it was ready. I still get chills when I think about how with all those flights home from NCTE, and all those seats on the plane, I ended up sitting next to her. I’m so grateful that she was open to talking with a stranger, to share her story. She provided a perspective I simply didn’t have.
Tomorrow, I’ll share more about my challenges with point of view and perspective in BREAKOUT. Here’s today’s prompt:
Your assignment: Spend five minutes writing about a moment of serendipity in your life, as it relates to writing or something else.
Thanks for joining me on this part of the Breakout writing-process journey! If you’d like to read the other posts in this series once they’re all posted, you can find them here.
Countdown to Breakout is a 23-day blog series about the three-year writing process for BREAKOUT, which earned starred reviews from both School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. It’s about a small-town prison break and manhunt that change the way three kids see their neighbors and the place they call home. Why a 23-day series? Because this book was inspired by the 2015 Clinton Correctional Facility prison break that led to a 23-day manhunt in June of 2015.
It takes a village…(of writer friends!)
No matter what I’m working on, I depend on writer friends and critique partners to provide early feedback and ideas for how to make the project stronger. When I shared my early draft of BREAKOUT, written in first person from Nora’s point of view, one theme emerged over and over. People wanted to hear more from Elidee. She’s one of the three main characters — the one who’s just moved from the Bronx to Wolf Creek, where she’s one of two black kids at the whole middle school. Might I want to think about rewriting the book, not only from Nora’s point of view but from Elidee’s as well?
I thought about that, and the more I did, the more I realized that the different perspectives different characters had on what was happening in this town were the most interesting part of the story. I wondered what it would be like to start over – to reimagine this not as a story told from one or two points of view but as a collection of documents reflecting many perspectives. I was traveling when I had this epiphany – I’d been attending the NCTE conference and was on the same flight home as my friend Linda Urban. We were supposed to be in different rows but managed to talk a nice lady into swapping places so we could sit together.
“So…” Linda said. “Do you want to talk about the book, or are you too wiped out from the conference.”
“I’m wiped out,” I said. “But I want to talk about it anyway.” I told her what I was thinking, that I might want to start the project over and write the story as a collection of documents.
The very best writer friends listen and ask questions that push you to think harder about your project. Linda is one of those friends.
“So is there a reason that these documents came to be collected together? Who collected them and why?” she asked. “Maybe there’s some story to it. Or maybe not. But I’m thinking of the book Where’d You Go, Bernadette? and how there’s a reason all those emails and notes are together. Were you thinking about that?”
I hadn’t been. But I was now. Linda helped me brainstorm what kinds of documents might be part of the story, with a focus on the kinds of communication that are part of the end of a school year, when this story takes place – morning announcements at school, field day plans, overdue library book notices. Here’s what that airplane brainstorming looked like by the time we landed for our layover in Philadelphia.
An hour into this in-flight brainstorming session, I noticed that the woman sitting on the other side of me had stopped reading her book and seemed to be listening. She was a teacher who was also returning from the conference, I could tell, so it didn’t surprise me that she was curious about what we were working on. But when she and I started talking, I realized that she had more of a connection to the story than I could have imagined. We’ll talk about that – and how this serendipitous meeting helped shape the story – tomorrow. Here’s today’s prompt:
Your assignment: Choose an article from this morning’s newspaper – a story about something that happened in the news. How might you rewrite that story through a series of different documents, all sharing different perspectives on what happened? Brainstorm a list of documents that you might include.
Thanks for joining me on this part of the Breakout writing-process journey! If you’d like to read the other posts in this series once they’re all posted, you can find them here.
Countdown to Breakout is a 23-day blog series about the three-year writing process for BREAKOUT, which earned starred reviews from both School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. It’s about a small-town prison break and manhunt that change the way three kids see their neighbors and the place they call home. Why a 23-day series? Because this book was inspired by the 2015 Clinton Correctional Facility prison break that led to a 23-day manhunt in June of 2015.
The Magic of Maps
Most often, we hear the term world building as it relates to creating a fictional universe of fantasy or science fiction, but really, this is an important part of the writing process for any book with a fictional setting, including works of realistic fiction. Fictional towns need to feel real. They need all the things that actual towns have – streets and schools and shops, but also secret places where people hang out and places where you aren’t allowed to go. They need relationships between people and power structures and traditions, and I could go on and on.
One of the ways I like to wrap my head around the fictional towns in my writing is by drawing maps. Sometimes, it’s on a large scale. Here’s the (very rough!) Wolf Creek map I made when I was working on BREAKOUT. I included important places like the school, prison, library, and church as well as where my characters live. And then I added smaller details – like tree forts where the kids play and places where people worried the inmates might be hiding.
Sometimes, it’s helpful to make more specific maps to help keep track of where action is happening. Near the end of BREAKOUT, there’s a relay race, and the course is very important to the story’s plot, so I sketched out a specific map for that, too, and kept it over my desk while I was writing that scene.
The real-life manhunt in Northern New York continued while I was working on all of this. I was about fifty pages into my first draft of BREAKOUT when it finally came to an end.
The story stayed in the news for weeks, though, as I finished my draft. And then…well, then I scrapped it started over. We’ll talk about that tomorrow. Here’s today’s prompt:
Your Assignment:Make a map of your neighborhood. Think about it as a place for stories, marking not only the streets and buildings but also where things happen. Where do neighbors gather to talk on a nice day? Where have the legendary stories of your neighborhood happened?
Thanks for joining me on this part of the Breakout writing-process journey! If you’d like to read the other posts in this series once they’re all posted, you can find them here.
